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Lucy, not shockingly, looked unmoved as she spared him a glance from the driver’s seat of her SUV. “It’s a quick visit to a fire scene, just to look around. Don’t get crazy.”
“A, I was born crazy. And B, don’t even try to tell me you haven’t been bored out of your mind in that academy classroom this week.”
The expression she tried (and failed, ha!) to hide told him he had her. “Okay, fine. While it’s always useful to review the basics, I miss knocking down fires. But that doesn’t make this a mission. If you try to climb those stairs—”
“I’m not climbing those stairs,” he reassured her. No matter how badly he wanted to know how that fire had been able to travel so fast, he wasn’t about to put himself in the position of getting crushed under a pile of timber and ash.Orput Lucy in any sort of danger of being hurt. “But come on. You can’t deny that this is kind of fun. And it sure beats staying home all day, being bored out of your mind.”
“Ugh, okay, the thought of three whole days with nothing to do was kind of killing me,” Lucy admitted after a beat. “There’s only so much Netflix I can binge without going bugnuts crazy, you know?”
Sam laughed. “Yeah, I’m not much of a binge-watch-all-day guy.” His ADHD never let him watch more than an episode or two of anything before tempting him to take on something else. “But I resorted to cleaning my apartment from top to bottom the day Bridges sent us home. Floorboards and everything.”
“Wow. If that’s how you burn time when you’re at loose ends, you’re welcome to come be bored at my place anytime.”
“Happy to,” Sam said, and she barked out a laugh that he shouldn’t find cute, but totally did.
“I was kidding.”
But he shrugged. “I wasn’t. I’m bored, you’re bored. We both miss being on shift. It seems kind of stupid for us not to hang out, if you think about it.”
Lucy drove for a few minutes, seeming to consider it. “What about Hawk and Gates and Dempsey? Just because we’re not on shift doesn’t mean you can’t hang out with them.”
The suggestion stung in places it shouldn’t have. “Kind of weird when they’re on shift and we’re riding the pine, though.” Not to mention Hawk was still flaming mad at Sam’s indiscretion.
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Lucy said. “Shae and Quinn came over last night with Kennedy and Isabella, and it was nice, but it made me miss being at the house.” Her hands remained steady on the steering wheel, her gaze still fixed to the windshield, and if he hadn’t been right there next to her, he might not have noticed the way her voice had gone slightly softer over the admission. “Anyway, how do you want to do this scene inspection?”
Sam noticed the change in subject, but his brain—fucking traitor—happily went along for the bright and shiny ride. “I was thinking we’d just go check the place out and see what hit us. Take it from there.”
“You don’t want to come up with something more methodical?” she asked. “Some kind of a plan?”
A corner of a grin tugged at his mouth, completely involuntary. “On a scale of one to ten, how much would it bug you to just show up and do whatever instinct told you to?”
“Um, fifty-three.”
Sam laughed before realizing she was dead serious. “You’re a firefighter, Lucy, and a damn good one. Why the hell don’t you trust your gut?”
“Because,” she said, pressing her lips together as if she wanted to squash the word but it was too late. “I just like protocol, okay? Having a plan of action is smart.”
Oh, he wanted to push, and he nearly did, too. But something about the way she was sitting so rigidly beside him warned him that if he pushed, she’d shove, and he didn’t want to lose the ground he’d gained with her today.
Even though he really,reallywanted to know why she put more faith in the rules than she did in herself.
“Okay. If you feel that strongly about it, then let’s make a plan.”
Lucy looked surprised, but was too smart to question his motives. They spent the next fifteen minutes formulating a strategy for how to check out the warehouse, agreeing that following their original path inside was out of the question since the hallway had been blocked when the ceiling beam had fallen. Nat—he knew he’d always liked her for good reasons—had texted him a copy of the warehouse’s floor plan, so figuring out a secondary path inside was easy enough. Lucy’s shoulders lowered from their stranglehold on her neck with every passing minute, and by the time she pulled up in front of the warehouse, she seemed more at ease than she’d been since they’d left the arson investigation office.
That ease took a hit as they got out of her SUV, and Sam couldn’t say he blamed her.
“Damn,” Lucy said, her chocolate-brown stare going wide at the sight of the building in front of them. Or, more accurately, what was left of the building. The lot had been cordoned off with bright yellow caution tape strung from the telephone poles and nearby trees. Red signs bearing the RFD crest had been affixed to every window and door that Sam could see, all warning people to stay out by order of the fire marshal. The second and third floors bore a massive amount of damage, with most of the windows having blackened or blown out, the frames and walls burned down to expose the interior beyond. Angry black scorch marks covered the bricks that still stood, the wide, dark streaks a sharp contrast to the daylight now spilling through the spaces where dusty glass and old boards used to be.
“Yeah,” Sam agreed. Actively fighting fires in the moment sometimes made it tough to conceptualize the extent of the damage being done. Seeing a scene after the fact? Definitely hammered it home. “You ready for this?”
“As I’ll ever be,” Lucy said. The chill that had filled the air earlier had eased a little now that it was late morning, but Sam was still grateful for his jacket as he made his way from the curb to the crumbling sidewalk in front of the warehouse. The acrid smell of smoke and soot clung to the bricks, the familiar scent punching him right in the nose as the two of them moved closer to the building, ducking beneath the caution tape. Lucy snapped a handful of photos of the damage with her cell phone, and Sam took in the rest of the block before turning toward her.
“Not a whole lot of activity down here.” The warehouse was one of the only free-standing structures on this stretch, but all the other buildings Sam could see were either quiet or abandoned.
“We could probably do an online search and find out how many of these places are abandoned,” she said. “If any of the ones nearby house active businesses, maybe they have security cameras.”
It was a great idea, albeit highly unlikely to yield anything that would help them. None of the other places looked close enough. Still… “Footage of how the fire spreadwouldgo a hell of a long way to figuring out where it started. And possibly what caused it. If we can’t get anywhere with a search for cameras, maybe Nat can ask the Remington Police Department for potential footage.”
